Messages

496

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: October 22, 2021, 03:34:44 AM »

The size of rural ridings is already one of the barriers to proportional representation in Canada.  Its hard to persuade rural people to be even more physically and socially removed from their representative.  A likely solution is to switch the ten biggest metropolitan areas in Canada into groups of ridings and distribute those proportionally, while keeping FPtP for large rural ridings.  A third of the population of the country live in three metropolitan areas.

Two issues I have talked about before continue to grind forward: no less than ten servicemembers of the rank of general / admiral and up and one commander in charge of the Canadian Navy's training school in Halifax have been investigated, retired, or shifted into less visible positions due to accusations of sexual misconduct https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/sexual-misconduct-military-senior-leaders-dnd-caf-1.6218683

And after the incident in December 2019 when an indigenous grandfather and an indigenous child were handcuffed for trying to open bank accounts with their First Nations status cards, the Vancouver Police are changing their policy on handcuffing people taken into custody https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vpd-makes-policy-changes-following-bmo-handcuffing-incident-1.6218439

497

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition

« on: October 21, 2021, 06:22:21 AM »

I also saw something about the London Metropolitan Police creating an app to call in to verify that plainclothes officers are police officers which, again, would not have helped the murdered woman just made it quicker to track down her killer.

In the US, the War on Some People using Some Drugs was a big driver of police militarization (dealers start flushing the goods down the toilet, so police start dawn raids with battering rams and get surprised when robbers use the same tactic or a frightened homeowner stabs them; gangs settle their business disputes with Glocks, so the police demand heavier weapons and get offended that someone thinks firing 50 rounds at a traffic stop was excessive).  The UK has many fewer firearms in circulation, and its not quite as invested in the War on Some People as the USA is, so how does that affect things?

In the Can pol thread you brought up redistricting.  Are there debates in the UK about rural areas being over-represented by population but being further from the centres of power to use their representation like there are in Canada?

498

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: October 16, 2021, 04:12:08 AM »

We now have a date for the announcement of the new cabinet (26 October) and the first meeting of parliament (22 November).  The opposition leader are asking why we have a three-month break in parliament in the middle of a pandemic and a tainted drug crisis (the last government was dissolved in mid-August), and I rather agree.  But if your concept of government is sitting in a back room while deciding which of your employees to obey ... (shrugs in I just live here)

499

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Digital Humanities of the Caucasus: 19th October

« on: October 13, 2021, 04:42:05 AM »

Just across the black sea, here is an interesting Moldavian Style church at Piatra-Neamt from 1498 which combines Latin Christian and East Roman architecture https://nitter.eu/casedeepoca/status/1445842780643893249#m

500

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: October 09, 2021, 07:27:27 AM »

The substantive policy issues (such as they are) in October are the form of the new government (will the Liberals make long-term agreements with one or more opposition parties or build a majority for each bill separately?), the composition of the new Liberal cabinet, and a group of bills regulating speech on the internet which were abandoned in-progress when the election was called and will have to start again with the first reading.  Four women out of the 35 Liberal cabinet ministers lost their seats.  Journalists say that cabinet ministers in this government have mostly been figureheads with ill-defined, overlapping responsibilities and that staffers appointed by the Prime Minister's Office are the ones who actually decide and implement policy.  OTOH, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott were Liberal cabinet ministers under Trudeau.

Justin Trudeau celebrated his holding on to office with a small scandal.  Having created a National Day of Truth and Reconcilation because it was a Truth and Reconciliation Committee recommendation which didn't take anything away from people with power, he spent the first such day on vacation on the west coast of Vancouver Island.  Many people just took that day as a holiday, but it would have been wise for a PM to do something with indigenous people or residential-school survivors or just stay home.

Derek Sloan, the Ontario MP who was ejected from the Conservative caucus after repeatedly aligning himself with white supremacists, came fifth (less than 3% of the vote, behind the PPC) in his new riding in Alberta.

And after the recount, the two leading candidates in one riding were only 12 votes apart.

501

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Worldbuilding Magazine

« on: October 07, 2021, 10:52:07 PM »

It looks like it is under contact? https://www.worldbuildingmagazine.com/contact/  They could definitely be clearer whether they are a fanzine or a paying venue.  Because I block scripts by default, some sites don't work for me the way their designers expect.

Pyramid magazine (Steve Jackson games) used to be good for 'nonfiction essays oriented towards storytellers' but they changed their focus then shut down.

502

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Worldbuilding Magazine

« on: October 07, 2021, 04:07:29 PM »

This online fanzine (and podcast) seems like it might be of interest to Exilian folks? https://www.worldbuildingmagazine.com/

503

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition

« on: October 03, 2021, 06:23:08 AM »

As well as the ongoing crisis of shelves and petrol, the UK is also going through a major row since a police officer murdered a young woman after arresting her. The police response to this has not generally improved confidence: some of the murderer's colleagues are under investigation for messages shared with the murderer, but the police are largely digging in and insisting on the importance of the public trusting them without proposing to adopt any measures to regain said trust. Particularly bad have been suggestions that women worried about an officer's conduct should flag down a bus (what the driver is meant to do is unclear, and those with any experience of UK buses' propensity to stop will immediately see further problems here), or that they should call the police to check if it's a real police officer (to which the answer in this case would have been that yes, he was a real serving police officer), or that they should run away (which... what?).

David Allen Green on some wider issues around this is worth reading: https://davidallengreen.com/2021/10/the-i-will-make-something-up-who-are-they-going-to-believe-me-or-you-police-officer-only-gets-a-written-warning-and-why-this-matters-after-the-sarah-everard-murder/

I have noticed that recently quite a few institutions are brandishing some authority they imagine they had in the 1990s, rather than reforming themselves or responding to criticisms.  That never works and anyone who has listened to people arguing knows it.

In Anglo Canada, one problem the police have is that they get infected with the "wolf and the sheepdog" meme from the United States (and related ideas like the fashion for paramilitary uniforms).  Canadians who want use-of-force training often read books, watch videos, and hire instructors from the United States.  What are the main cultural influences on British police now that they don't hire as many aging ex-servicemembers?

504

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: September 30, 2021, 10:57:05 PM »

On the rise of the People's Party of Canada, its worth noting that in Alberta, the social-democratic, workers' New Democratic Party and the Liberals collectively gained almost 10% in vote share, while the PPC and the regional-nationalist Maverick Party gained about 6% between them.  The Conservatives went down from 69% of the vote to 55% in Alberta.  The Greens dropped from 2.8% of the vote to 0.9%.

A CBC reporter seems surprised by this, but the NDP were the first party in Canada to break into national politics from a regional base, and that base was in the west.  Traditionally the NDP and Conservatives fight for rural seats west of Ontario because the Liberals are a bit too central-Canadian and urban.  So the big three parties are still perfectly capable of persuading each other's voters to switch sides, and only a minority of the people leaving the Conservatives are choosing radical new parties.

505

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition

« on: September 30, 2021, 06:11:03 AM »

I suspect that the general idea of Tories being good at handling the economy is so ingrained that a lot of people assume it would be worse under Labour. Maybe.

I wonder if that commonplace is a Boomer thing?  Since at least the 1980s, Anglo conservative parties have built up massive deficits with tax cuts for the rich and military spending which centrist and leftist parties dutifully pay down.  But if you became interested in tax and economic policy in the 1970s, and are not scientific, you might get stuck.

506

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: September 28, 2021, 03:01:26 AM »

One thing I've also realised in recent years is the extent to which many voters don't necessarily understand that their district representatives aren't necessarily in government even if they win, which is an interesting source of anti-incumbency sentiment sometimes (in the North of England there have been suggestionst hat this is a problem for Labour, as voters in Labour areas blame the party, because it controls their area at all levels of government, rather than the government which is actually doing the things people are objecting to).

That is actually one of the obstacles of electoral reform in Canada, there is a large constituency for the 19th century idea of having a single MP as patron to appeal to.  But not many Canadians have that kind of relationship in practice, and MPs in most parties are tied down by strong party discipline and staffers appointed by the party head, so its not easy for a MP to respond to constituents' concerns in parliament.  One of our biggest problems in federal politics is that nobody believes in the 19th century norms on which our parliamentary system was based, but there is no appetite for changing the system to reflect the values our parties and MPs actually have.

Canada is very well-represented in far-right circles (the cranks who call themselves sovereign citizens or freemen on the land have joined up with the anti-vaxers) but the People's Party of Canada have a lot of steps ahead of them before they can pass a bill or nominate a minister.  Like UKIP, they might pull Tory policy in a xenophobic direction, but if Maxime Bernier had become Tory leader he could have done that directly.


Annamie Paul has resigned as leader of the Green Party of Canada.  Journalists like speculating which parties will replace their leaders, I think its a neurotypical thing?

507

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Afghanistan

« on: September 27, 2021, 12:26:54 AM »

Sarah Chayes (who I had never heard of before August) has a series of blog posts on the situation based on her contacts after she gave up on the NATO intervention and stopped living in Kabul after 2011 https://www.sarahchayes.org/blog-1

508

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: September 26, 2021, 06:15:28 PM »

I have also seen an argument that there are feedback loops: as (for example) the NDP has trouble winning rural seats against the Conservatives, its MPs tend to be urban and less aware of rural issues, so rural voters start to tune them out.  This election the Conservatives lost about seven suburban ridings in Greater Vancouver and Greater Toronto which they previously held.

I also see people who don't understand how coalition negotiations work, such as an Italian friend.  It does not help that journalists in Canada often talk about which party or leader "won" when at everything short of a majority, the election is just the first step in forming the government.  But I still think that "if I vote for party A, party A will have more seats in parliament" is easier to understand than many-party first-past-the-post.

OTOH, I like this map of the election results where each riding gets the same area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Canadian_Federal_Election_Cartogram_2021.svg  In national maps, thinly-populated rural areas tend to drown out the three urban areas where 1/3 of the population of Canada lives.  This is not the final results (it is missing the Green seat in Ontario) but still an alternative to maps of space.

509

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: September 24, 2021, 05:57:38 PM »

I am seeing some people in love with the sound of their own voices pronounce that Canadians must be satisfied with the current situation.  I think its more that the people who are not satisfied are not sure how to change that by voting under the current system and with such strong agreement between the three major party platforms.  If last election party A's candidate came first, party B's candidate came second, and party C's candidate came third, switching from A to C can result in B being elected.  Coalition negotiations under modern voting systems can be complicated, but voters can be sure that voting for party C will get C more seats in the legislature and won't cause their least-favourite party to get more seats.

I am also seeing speculation that former Green voters turned to the PPC because the Greens were the only party with a dramatic loss of votes.  I have not seen any surveys which back that, and its also possible that some traditional Green supporters stayed home (or split among the major parties) while new voters came out to vote PPC.  Since PPC supporters are not the kind of people who politely and honestly answer phone surveys or reporters' questions, it may be hard to get a sense of who actually voted for them.


Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou has reached a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (the same legal mechanism which wrecked the 2015 Liberal government!) with the US government.  The two Canadian hostages in Chinese prisons will probably be deported to Canada by spring 2022.


And the two Michaels are back in Canada.  We now have a very tough task of figuring out a response to China without being dragged into some plain old great-power encirclement of a rising great power.  Canada was first fooled into this in the Boer War and it has rarely turned out well for anyone except the local worms.

510

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: History yays

« on: September 24, 2021, 01:04:54 AM »

Nature is a very unreliable venue on archaeology and philology, but on first glance it looks like a properly formed article.

Agreed, I wouldn't normally expect an archaeological excavation to be reported in Nature, but this is very much not a normal excavation. Analysing the debris must have required expertise well outside the usual archaeological repertoire, and the conclusion seems like exactly the sort of thing that would appear in Nature if it had been found by any means other than archaeology.

And it does seem like the analysis involves people from many different specialties, its not "a physicist has reinvented the field of epidemic modelling" or "a biologist has reinvented historical linguistics."

Some of the people on social media are complaining that the archaeologists are from two places on the edge of academe (Veritas International University in California and the non-accredited Trinity Southwest University in New Mexico), but almost all archaeology in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan is funded by sectarians.  That is not really any stranger than the fact that most archaeology in Denmark is funded by Danes!  Nation-states have an ideological commitment to seeing people who lived in their territory as their spiritual ancestors, and worshipers of the God of Israel have an ideological commitment to see the ancient Jews as spiritual ancestors.  And this paper seems to be independent from the archaeologists.

I may give the paper another read on the weekend but I don't have the expertise to evaluate most of the details.